Review: Mozilla Weave keeps your Firefox installations in sync

Mozilla Labs has just released Weave 1.0 and (so far) it rocks for sync’ing up my Firefox installs on different computers. Weave is actually a lot more than just a synchronization tool, but that’s the first service to come out of the project.

So what’s the point of it? Let me paint you a picture: I’ve got desktop and laptop computers that I run Firefox on, and it’s a pain to have to re-implement, transfer and/or update settings, tabs, history, bookmarks, etc. whenever any of those changes on 1 or the other. Weave now takes care of that for me automatically.

All it takes is that you download the Firefox extension and once you restart FF, Weave will prompt you to sign in or create a Weave account. You can then sync your settings: bookmarks, preferences, history, tabs and passwords. You can opt out of sync’ing any of those.

Once you install Weave on another computer and sync up, you’ll notice that your bookmarks update automatically. However, your opened tabs don’t change automatically, which when you think about it is the best behavior. Instead, Firefox’s History menu will now have some new Weave options at the bottom that show you opened tabs on other systems. You can open any or all of these tabs.

Just one caveat. Weave obviously uses the ‘cloud’ to store your settings so that your other computers can get to and download them. It’s well protected and of course, you should choose strong passwords and passphrases.

However, if you’re not 100% comfortable with this paradigm, then you may want to opt out of sync’ing your browser passwords. As an aside, you may not ever want to store certain very sensitive passwords (such as for your bank or brokerage) in your browser.

About the only feature that I’d like to see incorporated into Weave is syncing of extensions. That can be problematic across different OSes, but I’m sure there can be a solution for identical operating systems.

So far, I’m quite happy with Weave’s synchronization and am looking forward to new services to roll out under the Weave umbrella.

You can get started here.